iPlanner

What is iPlanner?

A 4-year planning webapp for UIUC students that automatically informs users of credit count, missing prerequisites or corequisites, all in an intuitive graphical interface. \Wohoo/

Team Members & Role

• Jizheng (Daniel) He: Coordinator and architect; frontend development.
• Anant Matta: Frontend development.
• Encheng (Kevin) Xie: Backend development/data processing.
• Zihao (Edward) Huang: Backend development/server routing & database management.

Technical Architecture & File system

• backend: Springboot-based backend.
  • config: Configures CORS policy for development environment.
  • controller: Routers that handle frontend requests.
  • dao: Data Access Objects that interact with the MongoDB database.
  • model: Data Transfer Objects, datatypes of "documents" in each table.
  • service: Service classes for data processing/downloading/saving and user authentication.
  • vo: View Objects used for frontend-backend communications.
• frontend: React-based frontend.
  • App.tsx: Main entry.
  • components/PlanTable.tsx: 4-year + proficiency planning table that supports dragging/dropping.
  • components/SearchBar.tsx: Responsive course searching based on subject/number/title.
  • components/LoginForm.tsx: Login/save/load user plans.
  • utils/CardActions.tsx: Reducer-based card actions for all components/CourseCard UI properties.

Backend Dev Environment Setup

1. Download and install JDK 17 Installer.
2. Install Maven:

• If Windows, install Chocolatey:

  Set-ExecutionPolicy AllSigned
  Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://community.chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))

  Then install Maven by:

  choco install maven

• If MacOS/Linux, install homebrew:

  /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

  Then install Maven by:

  brew install maven

3. In VSCode, install extensions "Extension Pack for Java" and "Spring Boot Extension Pack."
4. Set VSCode settings "Java > Jdt > Ls > Java: Home" to your java executable's directory.

• For Windows, the directoy will be something like c:\\Program Files\\Java\\jdk-17, make sure to use escaped backslash characters!.
• For MacOS, get the directory by running /usr/libexec/java_home -v 17 in your terminal.

5. While you are in the main Java file IplannerApplication.java, click F5 to run.

Frontend Dev Environment Setup

1. Install Node.js.
2. Install yarn via npm:

   npm install --global yarn

3. Start the frontend server:

   cd frontend/
   yarn install
   yarn start

4. Make sure it runs on port 3000, or it will fail the CORS policy of the backend configuration.

Database Setup

Read all instructions before you start.

MongoDB Installation

1. Go to MongoDB's official website, select "Version 6.0.4 (current)", and download the MongoDB installer.
2. Keep everything as default in the installer.
3. Open MongoDB Compass (a GUI tool similar to MySQL workbench). Connect to localhost:27017 (this should be the default connection).
4. If all is good you should see the database. Create a database named iplanner and a collection named courses.

Springboot JPA Configuration

1. Create application-dev.properties in directory backend/src/main/resources (i.e. the same directory as application.properties). This file is .gitignore'd from the project and contains local development environment information.
2. Copy-paste the following configuration into the newly created file:

   spring.data.mongodb.uri = mongodb://localhost:27017/iplanner
   spring.data.mongodb.database = iplanner
   

3. In VSCode, reload your Java Project by "View > Command Palette" (in Windows Ctrl+Shift+P), search for "Java > Clean Java Language Server Workspace", hit Enter, and click "Reload and Delete" on the bottom-right pop-up.

Load in course dataset

1. Access http://localhost:1123/api/course/load-data and wait for magic to happen! This takes around 2 minutes since there are ~9.2k courses in total.